Finches can become regular guests at your home, with the help of Jennifer Scardino's new book 'My Backyard is for the Birds.' / John Ziomek/COURIER-POST

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Kevin C. Shelly

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mybaisforbig2.html■ To learn how to participate in Cornell’s Citizen Science project, visit birds.cornell.edu/citsci/■ To learn more about New Jerey Audubon’s New Jersey Young Birder’s Club, call (609)861-1608 or visit tinyurl.com/jwvfeab

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Jennifer Scardino’s backyard is not about patio furniture, a fire pit or a manicured lawn.

Instead, it’s about finches, nuthatches, tufted titmice and a multitude of other winged creatures.

Your backyard can become a welcoming place for birds, too, all winter long, just when feathered friends need help the most, says Scardino, the recent author of a booklet, “My Backyard is for the Birds.”

Eric Stiles, the president of New Jersey Audubon, loves the idea of simple backyard birding espoused by Scardino.

“A million people in New Jersey are attracting backyard birds. Which is great, You get to see nature in three dimensions. The spectacular blue of a bluejay, the red of a cardinal, a nuthatch hanging upside down, Nature is recolonizing suburban areas and when you attract birds, you are inviting nature back in,” said Stiles.

“Let yourself be adventurous. Let go of the chemical cocktail that is most lawns. Stop feeding the lawn and plant flowers and bushes for the birds instead,” said Stiles, who loves the premise of Scardino’s booklet.

Pete Dunne of the Cape May Bird Observatory thinks the backyard is where kids fall in love with birds and he’s enthused there’s a new book with that focus aimed specifically at youngsters.

“Your backyard is your first frontier. From your backyard, you can see the rest of nature. Nature doesn’t recognize boundaries. Nature doesn’t know it is in your backyard, but the suburbs are where nature is colonizing.”

A bit of background about first-time author Scardino underscores what Dunne has to say:

The 42-year-old hair stylist learned about birds from her grandparents, George and Edna Bakley, beginning when she was perhaps 6.

Every visit to her grandparents’ house in Magnolia included the ritual of looking out the window with a pair of binoculars to identify what bird species were feeding there.

The lessons took.

Scardino put up her first feeder in 1994. She’s fed birds ever since. To this day, birdhouses made by her late grandfather are treasures to Scardino.

Watching birds is now a family legacy.

One of her nieces “was taken by” her aunt’s interest in birds, asking to watch birds with her whenever she came to visit.

The niece even borrowed Scardino’s field guide.

“She slept with it!” though the guide was too advanced and sometimes confusing, Scardino recalled.

That’s when Scardino began taking notes and eventually teaching Girl Scout troops and elementary school students about backyard birds.

She wrote. She put the notes away. She got them out and wrote some more, a pattern that went on for several years.

A book?

Maybe, but for a long time the notes were just a lesson plan.

Then one of her clients, Karen Padulla, published a book. Padulla, also was adept at illustration.

That’s how Scardino ended up self-publishing her own book, which is available from her publisher, Rose Dog, and from Amazon.

Scardino is happy to share these tips to turn your own backyard into a haven for birds:

Create a haven

1. Birds need three things to find your backyard attractive: Food, water and shelter. Offer all three and your yard will fill with birds, even in winter.

2. Forget cheap bird seed mix, which is mostly millet. Much of the millet just gets kicked out, pushed to the ground by birds looking for better seed.

3. Offer a mix of feed to attract a mix of birds. Her booklet offers tips by species. For instance, titmice like black oil sunflower. Goldfinches like thistle. Suet draws other distinct species. She’s trying out dried meal worms, but so far they’ve been ignored.

4. Don’t be a tidy gardener. Leave the dead and dying vegetation. Birds will peck seeds from your plants and seek shelter all winter long.

5. Evergreens, including holly trees, make good shelter for roosting. And hollies, with their fall and winter berries, will draw birds that won’t come to feeders, such as a ravenous flock of cedar waxwings.

6. Squirrels love bird food. In fact, they think it is squirrel food. Hang feeders distant from tree trunks and branches so they can’t leap from them onto the feeders. Use baffles above feeders.

7. A plain birdbath is a good bird attractor. But they are prone to freezing in winter. A concrete birdbath with a heating element will assure a ready supply of water, which means birds will visit your yard when your neighbor’s birdbaths are frozen.

8. Keep the feeders clean. Every two weeks or so, empty them out and brush them with bleach and water in a 1 to 4 concentration. Birds carry a variety of diseases, but most concerning is conjunctivitis, an eye disease that’s been especially hard on finches.

9. Keep notes. Every year Scardino does a feeder watch through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Citizen Science, tracking numbers by species.

But she doesn’t need a note to remind her of her favorite backyard bird, a massive pileated woodpecker — think of Woody the Woodpecker about the size of a crow — that stayed around for a whole season.

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